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August 20 - November 13, 2022
challenge the existing political and social status quo.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION created a critical juncture that affected almost every country.
The Ottoman Empire remained absolutist until it collapsed at the end of the First World War,
In nineteenth-century Russia, for example, the tsars were absolutist rulers supported by a nobility that represented about 1 percent of the total population.
until 1905, when the tsar created the Duma, though he quickly undermined what few powers he had given to it.
was a mass system of labor coercion
and control,
many had centralized states, or at least states that were centralized enough to impose bans on innovations such as the printing press.
We will see in this chapter that in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (for example, Somalia and southern Sudan) a major barrier to industrialization was the lack of any form of political centralization.
process of political centralization also ushers in an era of greater absolutism.
by Peter the Great between 1682 and his death in 1725.
His military reforms led the traditional royal guards, the Streltsy, to rebel. Their revolt was followed by others, such as the Bashkirs in Central Asia and the Bulavin Rebellion.
In this chapter, we will see how during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution, many nations missed the boat and failed to take advantage of the spread of industry. Either they had absolutist political and extractive economic institutions, as in the Ottoman Empire, or they lacked political centralization, as in Somalia.
The Spanish equivalent of the English Parliament, the Cortes, existed in name only. Spain was forged in 1492 with the merger of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon via the marriage of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.
end of the Reconquest, the long process of ousting the Arabs who had occupied the south of Spain, and built the great cities of Granada, Cordova, and Seville, since the eighth century.
subsequent dynastic marriages and inheritances created a European superstate.
What had been a merger of two Spanish kingdoms in 1492 became a multicontinental empire, and Charles continued the project of strengthening the absolutist state
aided by the discovery of precious metals in the Americas.
“royal fifth,”
economic decline.
expropriation of the Jews.
Between 1609 and 1614, Philip III expelled the Moriscos,
Property rights were insecure in other dimensions under Habsburg rule in Spain.
impact of absolutism on the economic institutions of trade and the development of the Spanish colonial empire.
trade between their new colonies and Spain via a guild of merchants in Seville.
trade within the Americas was heavily regulated.
the Castilian Cortes needed to be summoned to assent to new taxes. Nevertheless, the Cortes in Castile and Aragon primarily represented the major cities,
It could not legislate, and even the scope of its powers with respect to taxation was limited.
Charles V and Philip II required ever-increasing tax revenues to finance a series of expensive wars.
Comunero Rebellion.
After 1664 the Cortes did not meet again until it would be reconstructed during the Napoleonic invasions almost 150 years later.
The monarchy was not only failing to create secure property rights for entrepreneurs and monopolizing trade, but it was also selling offices, often making them hereditary, indulging in tax farming, and even selling immunity from justice.
the critical juncture was the discovery of the Americas.
In Spain, for example, the lack of secure property rights and the widespread economic decline meant that people simply did not have the incentive to make the necessary investments and sacrifices.
In Russia and Austria-Hungary, it wasn’t simply the neglect and mismanagement of the elites and the insidious economic slide under extractive institutions that prevented industrialization; instead, the rulers actively blocked
Revolution, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the political map of Europe was quite different from how it is today.
Merchants in the Habsburg domains were much less important than in England, and serfdom prevailed in the lands in Eastern Europe.
Francis I, who ruled as the last emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, between 1792 and 1806, and then emperor of Austria-Hungary until his death in 1835, was a consummate absolutist.
The empress Maria Theresa, who reigned between 1740 and 1780,
she and her son Joseph II, who was emperor between 1780
and 1790, were responsible for an attempt to construct a more powerful central state and more effective administrative system.
no national parliament
Francis dissolved the State Council that Maria Theresa had used as a forum for consultation with her ministers.
police state
Count Hartig,
Prince von Metternich, appointed as his foreign minister in 1809.
feudal order and serfdom.
The urban economy was dominated by guilds, which restricted entry into professions.
blocked the dissemination of technologies that people would have been otherwise willing to adopt with the existing economic institutions.
First, Francis I was opposed to the development of industry.
